Coraggio Consulting
Albemarle County School Board Regular Meeting, Thursday, February 22, 2024

Date: Thursday, February 22, 2024
Place: Albemarle County Public Schools / School Board meeting, Virginia
Length: 1h 51m (video)
Official meeting video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep7ByPF8aO4

Machine transcript (speech-to-text) produced by Coraggio Consulting. Not an official county record. Names and numbers may be misspelled; check the video at the timestamp before quoting.
Speech-to-text: whisper.cpp, model large-v3-turbo. Produced 2026-10-13. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

[00:00:00] School board meeting back to order. Do we have a motion? Yes. I move that the board certified by recorded vote that to the best of each board member's knowledge, only public business matters lawfully exempted from the open meeting requirements of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and identified in the motion authorizing the closed meeting were heard, discussed, or considered in a closed meeting.

[00:00:24] Second. Moved by Ms. Osborne, seconded by Dr. Acuff. Could we have a roll call vote, please? Dr. Acuff? yes miss spilman yes miss osborne yes mr graham page yes miss doctor i'm sorry mr chuck pace yes

[00:01:06] chair lee yes so moved okay uh next we will have our roll call let's start with josiah black good evening i'm josiah black school division council um allison spillman at large representative ellen

[00:01:23] Osborne, Scottsville District. Rebecca Berlin, Whitehall. Judy Lee, Rivanna District. Kate Acuff, Jack Jewett District. Graham Page, Jamila District. Chuck Pace, Ryo District. Helen Dunn, Public Affairs and Strategic Communications Officer. Christine Thompson, Clerk of the Board. Pat McLaughlin, Assistant Superintendent. Chandra Hayes, Assistant Superintendent. Rosalind Schmidt, Chief Operating Officer. And Dr. Howe is down in the seats. Next we'll stand for our Pledge of Allegiance. Next we'll have our

[00:02:21] moment of silence. Tonight we have a special work session for our budget so

[00:03:04] we'll be receiving the superintendent's presentation of the draft funding request. Dr. Haasman, are we ready? The main the main feedback I presented this at the leadership team the other day and people were telling me I needed to smile when I was presenting so if you see me begin to furrow my brows or whatever it's if you smile at me that would be my cue to smile. And also my wife told me to not

[00:03:38] slouch um it's been telling me that for 34 years it hasn't worked yet so uh but i but in this slide really is my opportunity to say thank you uh i'm gonna start my timer for this opportunity seem to see the mouse here oh let's see i can't see it because it's up there i think i've got it okay you got it all right i don't need the time probably fine but i want to thank you for the

[00:04:17] opportunity to present this draft and then also i really want to thank our fiscal services department Jackson Zimmerman, our school finance officer, Dave Buscemi, Rita Dean, Annette DeFrank, Stephanie Grady, Amy Hottinger, Anita Moore, Jill Preddy, Michelle Shiflett, and Gina Weigold for all the work that they did to help put this together. And of course, mentioning separately Ms. Maya Kumazawa for her leadership her technical skill and her ability to problem-solve and look for

[00:04:54] opportunities just an amazing partner in this work key partners just for the presentation part have been of course Jennifer Butler and Jennifer said she's watching on stream so thank you Jennifer Sarah Dusenberry who works our power bi she's our data analyst and reporting specialist Jamie Gellner Lauren Hunt and of course Rosalyn, Christine Thompson and Tara Bolton have all really tons of

[00:05:30] effort to pull it all together and of course I if I failed to mention Helen has really kind of just helped frame the whole thing up right from the get-go so thank you all right so for the agenda this evening I've just got six topics and we'll just work our way through am I advancing or you do you want me to I I think I can and if I forget you could or if I'm blathering you can push me ahead so just beginning with our strategic plan and talk a little bit about continuous improvement we're all well familiar with this plan now it's

[00:06:06] been in place for three years and one of the things I'm really proud to say is that our strategic plan is about the it guides our budget it's not just a static document that sits on the shelf and when we work on our spending plan our draft spending plan and arrive at an eventual budget. It's integrated and we don't back into it when we're asked about it. Sometimes it helps just to say things differently to make it more clear.

[00:06:34] Our mission statement, for example, just reframed more in clear everyday language. As a team, we want to make sure that race, class, gender, and special capacities do not decide how well our children do in school. We plan to achieve this by providing excellent teaching and learning opportunities for everyone we also want to connect with families and communities to make sure every student does well and our goal is to get to know each student personally so we have a plan how does it become action well it becomes action

[00:07:13] through often a series of steps that are related to each other and involve different segments of our school community and so this is just the beginning of a theory it's not the theory but the beginning of the beginning and you can see central to all this is students and families when our school board members are in the policy role and seeking feedback and listening allocating resources that leads to work through the central office principals and administration educators support staff leading to students learning and

[00:07:48] growing another way that the strategic plan becomes a reality is when the school board uses it to develop operating principles one of the things we talk about in our plan our third goal is to have transformative and equitable resources and taking that translating it into operating principles for the board that you use when you're developing your budget is how that becomes real you worked with Maya five years ago to develop these operating principles and I

[00:08:24] I request you know that the board on a frequent basis take a look at these principles to see if they still fit the work that we're doing okay they're with there they're admirable and they also are open to to change with the times so we are all the way third from the right we're still kind of in the middle we're at the top where it says budget development the draft funding requests so we're still in the thick of it and if you get you begin with the end in mind

[00:09:01] our ultimate goal is to have the budget balanced and state budget set by the video e or set didn't happen this school year until September I hope they move a little faster this year that would be great but that's where we're headed and ultimately balancing but we're we're far from there and I think it's important to remember that that we're still in the thick of it there's been a lot of work up front to pull in our school community our employees our students our families through various advisory groups and to hear them and hear what their needs are

[00:09:39] and hear their ideas and that's turned into planning preliminary planning and so that's where we are tonight is a very preliminary draft plan to share with the board another goal in our strategic plan is to affirm and empower our communities and again we want that we want that to come to life we don't just want it to be a goal stated on a piece of paper so as part of the the engagement process for budget planning or for our spending plan there are mere ad groups

[00:10:14] that Maya meets with that our staff meets with and we provide protocols for these advisories to have input for our spending plan the benefit of this though is always turns out to be much more than just conversations about spending money and in the budget when we engage with employees we engage with our students we learn a lot about their day-to-day experiences how we the successes they're having the wins the challenges and it's always opportunities to help on an individual basis not long ago we started doing something new we

[00:10:52] call it the all welcome meeting where we invited employees all employees to attend on the workday and miss building was there that was fun and so we met at Western, and it was just an opportunity to present just a short presentation. Maya and Dr.

[00:11:10] Kaiser, Claire Kaiser, presented how we staff our schools and answered questions about that, and then we just did Q&A for close to an hour and 15 minutes. And I had a lot of positive feedback about it, and I did a survey to see how it went. Our next one is planned for March 29th, so we'll probably pick one of the high schools to do that as well that's the next work day so we'll put it out an invite pretty soon through all of these engagement opportunities and listening and really focusing in on what teachers and

[00:11:48] students need for high quality teaching and learning and feeling safe in school all these ideas were prioritized through that process and they're all aligned with our mission aligned with our overarching goals what I want to draw your attention to is that the ones that are bold and asterisk those are the ones that we are a few slides later on you'll see those are the ones that we are putting forth and I'll also go

[00:12:20] into the rationale for that I'll just give you a minute to take a look at it I don't think there's any surprises some of these we just prior to the pandemic we had a pretty flush budget process that That year, we were looking at sick leave payout upon retirement.

[00:12:42] That was the first year we were planning on taking a swing at the $15 minimum wage. We had to back off of that and then bring it back after the pandemic onset. And there are other new things like a community and schools coordinator, a walk to school coordinator, planner, some innovations that we would try to build fairness and equity into the opportunities that we have.

[00:13:07] next thing I want to touch base on is the ever-increasing role in public schools because I think it sets the context for where we are right now there's this is this comes out of a book by Dave Jett called courageous school leadership you have a you have the chapter a paper copy of it and he's referencing a book called schools can't do it alone by Jamie Vollmer and one of the things I recognize and I left it this way so I could talk a little bit about it is that that for all the way to the 17th century it's somewhat a whitewashing of history

[00:13:45] of schools talks about the Puritans establishing public schools and basic reading writing arithmetic and cultivating values that serve a democratic society which is true however one of our colleagues Sarah Harris not long ago advertised a book study and I recommend this book it's called schoolhouse burning the whole first part of the book talks about the establishment of community schools by black communities after the Civil War

[00:14:19] during Reconstruction and into the late 19th century early 20th century and as you read and learn about the how those schools established community the skills that they worked on the supporting student needs ultimately fighting for democracy and advocating with their states and federal government for funding they really laid the foundation for what I think our current model of public schooling is so I haven't seen it that described this way before because I

[00:14:55] attended the whitewashed school history classes when I was learning to become a teacher so it's a Derek black schoolhouse burning so moving into the 20th century there there's a shift historical shift with schools taking on more programs to provide services that other sectors of society government and family once provided and then moving forward into the latter part of the 20th century he the author talks about 86 additional responsibilities and I'll

[00:15:31] list some of those when I go to the next slide so let's see I want to be able to scroll this but it doesn't work with my finger do n let's see it's fighting me I want to be able to scroll my notes Christine Thompson Christine Thompson do we know how to scroll the notes here so I could see I wasn't gonna rely on

[00:16:05] notes but problem is I can't see the mouse on that's all right I'll just go through it thank you sir thank you buddy so um during the last several decades you can see that mission changing from the earliest iteration of public schools and submit some examples from 1910 to 1930 include adding physical education including organized sports to our high schools in the 1940s

[00:16:42] we added several things including school lunch programs half-day kindergarten 1950s with Sputnik there were expansion of science and math education, driver's education, sex education. Virginia calls it family life and didn't seem to have the nerve to start it until 1990, but it's claimed that it was in the 50s here. 1960s AP programs, Head Start, Title I, Adult Education, Consumer Education. Of course it was the 60s, so things about peace,

[00:17:21] leisure recreation 1970s programs really took off with title 9 IDEA English as a second language programming after school programs alternative education and then you get into the 1990s there was seemed to be a tug-of-war pushing back and forth on which federal which which party had the could claim public

[00:17:53] education, you had Goals 2000 with the Democrats, America 2000 initiatives. And then when you get into the 21st century, it's No Child Left Behind, which was a Republican initiative followed by Every Student Succeeds and including Race to the Top when Arne Duncan was the Secretary of Education. And that's when we began more of a corporate education reform model. And the list goes on and it really doesn't include all the mandated testing that we do how much time and energy we put into that for accreditation and it certainly

[00:18:32] doesn't count the last few years where we had the onset of the coven 19 pandemic which really completely transformed the role of public schools in our in our society I don't say this all to complain because that's what we do and that's all I've ever known I started teaching in 1990 when schools were already very much about community and we didn't have all the great programs that we've added over time to help support the whole child and families but it was what I understood education to be I had lunch tickets

[00:19:10] when I was a student in school so I had free and reduced lunch I never thought twice about it was just part of my school program so I see it as our equity mission part of our equity mission and one of our values we say that we will provide every student with the level of support necessary to thrive and we have employees with the passion and the expertise to do the work and they're well situated to do that work work and schools are best situated the issue is that we are not granted the resources to do the work and that's the challenge we

[00:19:48] run into and that's the challenge that we're going to confront this year as we work our way through our spending plan bring on bring it on we want to be we want we want to serve students and their families we need the resources to do the work and so leading that leads to a little bit of conversation about our revenue trend and the current funding gap all these article spotlights I provided for you with paper and in that way the community also can can access these this serves as a history of local and state funding changes particularly

[00:20:27] during the onset of the pandemic if you just kind of watch it it's a history lesson of things that were going on after the great recession of the 21st century post great recession and then moving into the pandemic around fy21 and then it's you know we have our peaks and valleys and part of what i want to draw your attention to is that with and this is and the fy25 draft is with our current proposals it's it is a modest gap that we're looking at right now it's about a five percent

[00:21:07] gap in terms of the proposals that we're putting forward so we're not looking at having some issues around our revenue and then still putting out a 15 percent uh peak like we did in fy22 when we had strong uh very strong local revenue but it's a it's a good trail to follow and of course you can see at the at the end of it you've got the state revenue taking the plunge and I'll talk a little bit about that. The plunge is primarily around what is called the local composite index and I won't I know when Jim Reginball came he

[00:21:47] gave a great explanation of how that worked. There's other things in there too like repealing the hold harmless that locality is received around the grocery tax but the big culprit is around the look the lci and you can see a 14 percent change from the 20 22 24 biennium to the 20 24 26 biennium and the three factors as you know that go into calculating our local ability to pay our property values which makes sense because property taxes is what goes

[00:22:24] into local revenue that supports the schools which as you can see is the is the lion's share and then our local government funds beyond that as a percentage the next part is state sales tax which also makes sense because that all goes to Richmond goes in the big hopper and then it's distributed around the state on a approximation of equity through the LCI the the really flawed part of it is the adjusted gross income because what that hat what happens with

[00:23:00] that is it all is calculated through tax returns going to Richmond and it's two year old data and it tells you about spikes in local income and we don't have access to that it's an approximation of wealth it's a factor that's supposed to be used to say well you have all this local income therefore you can spend more money on put on public schools in your community so all those things go together look and really the the the one that's the worst issue in there is the adjusted gross income in terms of how it impacted us we had the fourth largest

[00:23:40] growth in our composite index in Virginia and Charlottesville had the third and there's an article that I provided that actually Rebecca provided that talked about how the flaws in the LCI have were listed in the article as one of 22 districts in Virginia that are expected to pay more than Loudoun, which is the most, which is the richest county in America. So because of those flaws and because people are migrating into our area but

[00:24:15] working and still working in Washington, D.C. So I think I've said enough about the LCI. We wish we could put a stake in it and but that's not going to happen anytime soon so then you just kind of look at the whole big picture around our school revenue change do you look at what we had last year FY 24 it was our adopted and then our draft and you could see the difference there in our local revenue about close to the ten million dollars it's moderate growth but it's still reliable growth and we

[00:24:51] know what it is right now in terms of the state you see the drop and then with federal it's kind of hard to look at that given all the federal requirements that we have 618 000 out of a 270 million dollar budget so there's there's your gap there's the difference in total revenues kind of sums that up and so now let's turn to uh expend to our expenditure summary so as i mentioned earlier it's a five percent possible or proposed expenditure increase

[00:25:30] Elimination of one-time FY24 expenditures is really elimination of spent use of fund balance that we had in our budget last year. So that's typical. The baseline adjustment, the $4 million there, there are some baseline adjustments.

[00:25:51] The biggest one is the 2% pay increase that we provided employees during the course of this school year. That was that we did not, as you noticed, we didn't make a technical adjustment or appropriate funding to do that. We just smooshed it into the current spending plan. So we have to appropriate it this year as part of the operating budget. Technical changes, non-discretionary, things like electricity costs, inflation, stuff like that. And then the proposals are about $10 million.

[00:26:25] So let's talk about the proposals. And it's just five. And when you looked at all those ideas earlier, I would say that those ideas were around accelerating. They were about moving things forward better and faster than what we've been currently doing things are improving but we're about continuous improvement and keep getting better i believe if we could include most of those or prioritize them in some way and and have a lot of them we we can move faster we could we could keep getting better faster these are really about um holding the course uh maintaining service

[00:27:03] that we have in place which we have a lot of a lot of services in place that are helping us move forward so it's not trying to move backwards but it really is about holding our course with where we are three percent market increase English learner growth special education growth social emotional supports and intervention talk a little bit about this little little more detail so I want to talk a little bit about sustainable wages it 76% of our employees of all kinds live in

[00:27:43] Charlottesville or Albemarle which is as you know the the cost of labor and cost of living and living in this area are very high and so it's it is something to take into consideration we want to stay competitive when we when we have a tough market we kept the board the board has localities are right around us but we also still benchmark ourselves against Prince William and Henrico Alexandria and because we are really competing with those places just because they're there are many miles away there you know how tough it is right now to hire a math

[00:28:21] teacher or a special ed teacher you're competing with those places so we want to be competitive so the board set a target of 60% instead of being at market which is 50% and we have the board has taken big swings to get to the top of our local market we have the highest starting pay for teachers in our region right here in our vicinity. And then we do standardized increases which cost more and what that means is that when we apply comp increases we don't just say well the teachers the licensed staff get this and then the classified staff get this we do the same for everybody and that was something that this board

[00:29:00] started doing maybe three years ago that was and so you decided at that point we're all moving forward together. There's a lot of reasons why we want to have this increase one that's particularly hits home for me is that we've had a lot of success with provisional licensure with our paraprofessionals joining our teaching force which has caused for us to have a growth in our diversity of our of our teaching core because there's a lot of

[00:29:37] diversity in our professional core and as they move into the teaching ranks you saw a two percent bump in our teachers of color last year which was historic for album all so another article I did put in there was just just driving home for our community the power of diversity in our workforce that there's there's this myth out there that diversity equity inclusion is is kind of a dead concept and that fortune 500 companies are abandoning these programs it's absolutely not true you see it in the negativity of the media because it draws

[00:30:17] attention but recently that the article that I sent you came from NPR marketplace and it talked about surveying fortune 500 CEOs whether they how much they value diversity why do they value it and and the majority even I shouldn't say even but the majority across political spectrum and the type of company said diversity is important in their workforce and the reason is because you get better results in the work you get when you have racially culturally age

[00:30:54] creed religion neurologically and nationally diverse gender expansive workforce you can really asset access the strengths of your workforce when you do that it leads to innovation your creativity that you weren't going to have before you get better decisions it enhances your decision-making capacity because everybody looks at something through a different cultural lens or experiences that they've had in life which really pushes things forward and I'm convinced that the more diverse we are as a school system particularly in

[00:31:31] our teaching ranks we will be more successful for those reasons let alone the reason of having teachers that look like our children so it worries me when we we if we could loop if we lose our competitiveness in our pay so I think think this is a really this this slide we worked on a lot or I had input you got what big worked on a lot and it tells a story of these two student populations

[00:32:08] which are near and dear to us and it's a story of growth and it's a story not just of growth that we count each September but it's a story of growth during the year I think I don't know if my I came up with a particular way of doing that or Jennifer Butler but if you look on students with disabilities students with special capabilities enrollment and it's 1797 as of December it's 1923 and some of those are also seats that we pay for prep that's

[00:32:48] included in there but there's growth from there was there's been a great deal of growth during the school year either through identification or we are a destination for families with students with special needs because we really run a strong program here and staff it well and then you see the same thing for EL enrollment it we started the year with 1645 and now it's at 1751 as of February 13th I rehearsed this presentation in our leadership team meeting the other day and then I got a fantastic email from Lauren McLean and

[00:33:24] I'm not gonna like try to plagiarize what she said I'm just gonna read you what she said to me she said we talk about diversity as being important and valuable for staffing but when we talk about it for students we're still talking about it from a deficit based standpoint about how our ELs and our students with disabilities need more support I tell teachers and leaders that we don't need more EL staff because our EL students or our students with disabilities need more support we need more staffing so that we can empower these students to access the rich funds of knowledge they bring into our schools which makes our schools and

[00:34:04] communities better instruction for these students or she work is over EL so she said EL instruction 50 years ago was about providing meaningful access to instruction for our students but now it's about how we ensure we're able to access their funds of knowledge and she says it's really the same for students with disabilities and says it's a subtle shift but if we think about diversity as an asset we can't just say that for our staff we have to believe it for our students too I thought that was very well said and I think it speaks for the

[00:34:42] fact that by adding staff that we need we want to help these students to be academically successful the return on investment for that though with for our school community is much more than just raising test scores social emotional supports we used American rescue plan funding which was one-time funding we were charged by the governor to spend down that money so we we spent it down and we so we're looking at it now as something we want to build into our

[00:35:18] recurring budget but we read we redrafted the logic model that's in the budget notebook when you see that and when we had our work session the other night more than one board member talked about how when we're doing this work we don't want to just do it based on numbers at the schools and how do you look at what the needs of the school are based on what's happening there so you can see what we want to do is is hold serve and then plus so we want we need the funding to pay for this in the recurring budget but we want to add three positions or we're also grabbing three positions that are from a legacy

[00:35:57] program that we want to tool into this program so we want to move from the 24 FTE total to a total of 30. 27 out of our school fund, three that are in the legacy program that we started many years ago called the SEED program. There are still three staff out there with not connected to this initiative. We'd like to bring them into it because they have the expertise.

[00:36:25] So what and so what we would do is they would be they have a minimum of one in each school and then you differentiate staffing based on our universal screener for social emotional which is DESA, and then also panorama survey results, mental health referrals, threat assessments, chronic absenteeism rates, and free reduced lunch numbers.

[00:36:46] So by using that to differentiate, some schools will have some more support. And then three will be at the central office until school starts, where if they're schools that really have demonstrated a high need coming out of the last school year, we can use them to position them in those schools so because we want to be nimble with that and tiered supports meant the message the main thing I want to take away for this is that we want to hold serve on the reading and math

[00:37:25] interventionists that we currently provide to our schools so in our current model there's 63 FTE total and in the proposed model we also want to have 63 It's going to require additional local funding because of shifts in the federal funding.

[00:37:43] With IDEA, we are being required to use the money we were putting behind the FTE for this for other programs. And we had to do budget adjustments because the funding from title that used to pay for $15, now once you put it in today's dollars and catch up as you scrub the budget it doesn't pay for that many anymore so we need to add to that but the main thing is we want to hold it we want to

[00:38:14] hold constant from last year to this year with all those with those uh proposals in mind this then becomes your full expenditure summary and when i look at this what i see is an emphasis on instruction and then meeting student needs some other big players are transportation there's your there's how it's all all spread out and so once we've talked a little bit about anticipated revenues and now we're

[00:38:52] looking at proposed expenditures and you can see that we have a request of 272.9 million dollars and it includes now a 13.3 million dollar gap between ACPS student needs in our available revenue which is about five percent of the budget all right so uh we we debated some as to whether we should be talking about well how can we start closing this gap because you know right now it's just about the plan but i do think um i want to be sensitive to

[00:39:30] all to people that see this presentation and it could cause you worry uh to see a gap like that i want i uh when i talked to the leadership team about this the other day i i wanted to let them know that i'm i'm optimistic about how this will play out and i think it's really important for all of us as leaders is that to have a sense of optimism about it because it will play out we will hold serve for our students and then you have a new baseline that you work through

[00:40:05] in the next year but between now and then there's a lot that can happen remember i showed you earlier we are just beginning to get to the right on our process we're still in the middle of it this is is just the beginning we can plan for higher revenues and there's that's a real possibility the state and at the state level Governor Youngkin's budget landed with a thud you have the House and the Senate had they've both put forth budgets that increase education spending by 1.5 billion dollars somewhere in

[00:40:42] there there's stuff for us there's funding for us if they if they push the grocery tax hold harmless back in place that's on the order of more than three million dollars for us. If one of the pieces I saw I think in the Senate budget was around the support caps to to totally eliminate support caps that that's millions of dollars for Albemarle County because we really staff support staff. There are there and there are other opportunities working our way through that budget even including if the if they come through with a

[00:41:18] compensation increase over the next two years because part of our gap is a three percent comp increase so we've already budgeted for it and then funding we would receive for it then would supplant that and reduce our gap so I want to be encouraging about this we can make reductions we were exploring how we can look at reductions and that'll be part of work session one we'll need to okay we'll do it across the board so that there's you know everybody feels a little pain across the organization but not any you know nothing crippling

[00:41:55] because we can we can adjust this it's five percent of our budget and then we could also reduce those proposals i i do think it's less likely because they are i think we we would at least from a staff perspective to to meet the needs of our kids we need to keep moving forward with those um and i just want to say i you know i've kind of adopted a mantra having been here before the pandemic started and still living with it in the aftermath um i'm i'm one of not a whole lot of superintendents that were here before it started or stayed after it or during it and so

[00:42:33] what I've talked to people about is if we could get through that we could get through this okay we had a whole budget planned and made the presentation all that in the spring of 2020 the board was good you know salute we're ready to roll a few weeks later we had a new budget that was $15 million less. And I, when Rosalyn and I had our first conversations on Zoom about where we were going and with Maya, you know, the first thing we talked about is we're keeping our employees. When we talk to the board, that's what we want to do. That's our first priority

[00:43:11] because we were hearing from our bus drivers, well, you're not going to need us. You're going to keep us employed. And we heard from school staff, well, if you're going virtual, you're not need as many teachers for that we're going to furlough people what are we going to do so we just ended that question by saying no we're keeping our employees unless you re resign or retire and because you're ready to head out you're you started with us you're with us and i remember calling board members that were on the board at that time and saying you know our plan without we don't have a plan but what we're doing what we want to do is figure out how we're going to keep all the

[00:43:49] employees and judy said that's what i want to do too and ellen said that's what i want to do kate and graham jono dave all of them we want to we want to keep our employees and then we made it happen and i've always believed where there's a will there's a way and i want it's hard to say to somebody just trust trust us we got it but i want to know that that's i want people to know that that's the intention i wish i wish the trust you could you could be feel good about where we're headed and we're going to we're going to get through this together all of us

[00:44:24] together so let's we'll just hang in there and and however we're reacting to the budget shortfall is how people around us are going to react to it so we want to set a good example on that real quick just we started doing this a couple years ago while laying out where we are with capital look I like to look at our ten-year projection first so ten years from now we'll have we if the projections hold true have about another thousand students and you just kind of

[00:44:58] back it up five years out another 376 and we've taken that approach that big blue area because look at what's happened before that I mean it's a roller coaster so we have current needs and we will have greater needs in the future and we need to keep reforming education and how you do that as often the facilities. Our last new school was built in 2002. I was talking to a couple reporters today

[00:45:35] about the budget and they were looking at each other doing the math and they were 25 years old, so it's a long time ago when we had a new school. You can see where we're overcrowded. 53% of the students in the division attend overcrowded schools. High concentration in the high school and about 50 elementary school these are prioritized and the board has landed in the

[00:46:13] right priorities you can see right you look at the green you've budgeted and you're building center too and that's where high school was where your biggest your largest percentage of students are in overcrowded schools elementary was next so you're you've tackled the southern feeder pattern and northern feeder pattern and tonight um there'll be some conversation around that in terms of of redistricting work that's going on. Partially funded is the ongoing programs and high school improvements and elevators. You have a long list of unfunded and then looking out to FY30, 34, you

[00:46:52] can see the needs assessment. So that's kind of like looking out on the horizon of where we might need to go. And this is all coming from a long-range planning advisory committee. I did pop an article in there just talking about the one penny sales tax that's now been approved through the Senate in the house and that would mean a great deal for us locally that can be between 20 and 40 million dollars annually of capital dollars devoted to schools which would really help us catch up on

[00:47:24] what we need to get done conclusion and timeline all right so here's the timeline again look at all the stuff that's gone on but behind this planning my opportunity to thank our staff again for all work here's the draft funding request gonna have a public hearing got some work sessions on it go to the Board of Supervisors we're making our way and

[00:47:59] what's happening next will be the 29th that's a work session we'll look at all those topics in the meantime school board make sure you email budget at k-12 Albemarle as you are making your way through the budget notebook and I will just say you know I do a question and answer in the weekly check-in and I had the question a couple weeks ago someone asked me what are you excited about with the budget and what worries you and I said when I work with the budget I see

[00:48:36] more than just numbers I see individual people who make our schools and departments thrive my purpose here my purpose here in Alma County is to support the remarkable people working tirelessly to positively impact students learning and shape their present and future lives our school division budget predominantly consists of over 85 85 percent of our budget is people it's the people that you see like Kenny out there working every day and that's the budget in our school system and that's what I see and that's exciting and I've

[00:49:14] talked tonight a little bit about what concerns me but despite the challenges that we have I maintain hope for our future this immediate future our local government funding remains consistent and reliable. I'm optimistic because our Albemarle representatives in the Virginia legislature are committed to supporting our schools and shaping the final state budget. Furthermore, our school board staunchly supports our public schools. Every single one of you is a public school supporter and we'll work together and with our dedicated staff

[00:49:51] across the division, we can optimize our revenues to support students and employees. Our commitment is to ensure that factors such as race, class, gender, and special abilities do not dictate a child's success in school. We aim to achieve this by providing excellent teaching and learning opportunities for everyone and fostering connections with families and communities to ensure every student thrives. Our ultimate goal is to personally know each student and for them to know that they matter. And this mission is embodied in the dedication and skills of our ACPS staff.

[00:50:28] The budget is a reflection of our commitment to this mission. And I will work with the ACPS board to strive to maintain our current resources across schools and departments to see our mission through. And again, I thank you, school board and Chair Lee.

[00:50:45] I thank you for this opportunity. Thanks very much, Dr. Haas, and to all of our staff who worked very hard on that draft funding request. We have our copies, and we will dig in, And we'll have our first work session next week over those topics.

[00:51:03] And to anyone in the public, if you have any questions, you can also look at the job funding request and send your questions to budget@k12albemoral.org. I would just like to take notice that supervisors Diantha McKeel and Ned Galloway, both of whom served on this board for many years and who are some of our strongest advocates on the board of supervisors are here.

[00:51:32] And I'd like to also take note that the supervisors have allocated additional funding for our capital needs. And I thank you very much. And I know my colleagues on the board do as well.

[00:51:49] Thank you very much. Next, we will have our other business, 4.1, the Redistricting Study, Superintendent's Recommendation.

[00:51:58] I believe Rosalyn Schmidt will give that.

[00:52:41] Good evening. I'm Rosalyn Schmidt, Chief Operating Officer. And tonight, we'll present an update on the Redistricting Study, including superintendent's recommendation dr hox do you want to give any opening i uh thank you miss schmidt all right first of all i just really want to i want to start by thanking you um for you really did normally there are a few roles that lead these processes and rosalind recognizing that it really needed a comprehensive view from the chief operating officer's perspective to took it over pulled in staff from transportation building services to support as well as our

[00:53:20] third floor staff and really led a challenging process because the other big thank you that goes out is to the members of the committee because we really asked them to do something which is next to impossible which is to come in with your expertise you know you review everyone's application you see these incredible backgrounds that they've got planning and you know some of them with transportation urban design and you bring them in and they're they're still parents they're still families and so they've got to be able to to thread the needle between where their

[00:54:00] heart is and what how they can support their community and knowing that they all have children in the in the mix but also then bringing their that perspective to it with their professional expertise and um really can't thank that committee enough i fully support their recommendation and uh so i want ms schmidt to go ahead and provide the details thank you dr host um so just as some as some background um and this was presented to you when you approved this study back in august so in response to overcrowding at baker butler and planned developments along

[00:54:39] 29 north corridor a new elementary school is planned that was included in the capital slide at the end of that budget presentation unfortunately based on the timing of that available funding that school will not open until the 29 30 school year baker butler needs more immediate capacity leaf right now yesterday probably with more than 700 students it is the second largest elementary school in the division and is only projected to grow more in addition to baker butler two other Northern feeder pattern schools are experiencing enrollment challenges. Woodbrook over-enrolled and Stony Point under-enrolled. And so in August the board directed the superintendent to convene

[00:55:17] a redistricting advisory committee and conduct a comprehensive study about the potential boundary changes for next school year. This was the objectives that this board approved and the committee had used. The primary objective of the study was to recommend a two-phased approach to creating new boundaries in Northern feeder pattern. It included making a recommendation for boundary and changes that would be implemented next school year as well as a preliminary recommendation for a boundary for the new elementary school keeping the end in mind and working through a phased approach so the objectives in phase one on the right were with the committee was striving to

[00:55:52] achieve which was to decrease enrollment baker butler decrease enrollment at woodbrook increase enrollment at sony point involve other schools either to increase or decrease to achieve those objectives adjust middle school boundaries finalize the location of the new elementary school and create a preliminary boundary so as dr. Haas said it was a complicated study but we we progressed the committee was given guiding principles to evaluate options those included around the duration of the boundary with a goal of three to five or five to seven years a goal of

[00:56:29] contiguous areas, considering walk zones, transportation efficiencies, not splitting neighborhoods. We had a lot of conversations around demographic balance, balancing facility utilization, if it can be avoided, not toggling households back in both phases, and the concept of split feeder pattern, which is when a school is, an elementary school is distributed to attend two different middle schools. Echo Dr. Haas' gratitude to these committee members. We had a committee of 19 we started off slightly bigger lost some along the way but we

[00:57:05] ended with 19 strong representing all schools that were in the study as well as two committees the long-range Planning Advisory Committee and the Office of Community Engagement with a lens of equity these were all volunteers all parents who remain committed to this work and I had a couple of them and said that was a great experience I don't want to do that again I did have one that said that she would do it again but again it was a lot of time a lot of emotional energy while I facilitated the study we had a full team behind the work and behind the scenes including my Akumazawa from our fiscal Michelle

[00:57:44] instruction Eric Bill rich Lauren John and Judy so again thank you for their support the process that was followed was the committee was formed and met beginning in October they met seven times and finalized their recommendation earlier this month. Towards the end of their process, we hosted four community meetings to get feedback on the final scenario, and a community survey was issued as well. That brings us to the February-March time frame. This item is for you for information only. This is the superintendent's recommendation. It will be back before you on March 14th for action, and at the same time,

[00:58:24] you will also hold a public hearing for additional input in the process. If approved, boundaries would go into effect next school year the 24-25 school year the recommendations include a preliminary boundary for the new elementary school but that will be revisited in the fall of 2028 as we will have new sets of data and again the new school will open at this point august 2029 you're going to see a lot of maps so this just frames you in the current boundary in which schools were in the study so in the urban ring you have greer agner hurt and woodbrook up the 29 corridor holly mead

[00:59:01] and baker butler broadest wood on the left side of the screen and stony point and stone robinson on the right side of the screen we're going to share a lot of data around capacity and enrollment so i think it's important to know the source of those data points so first enrollment projections dr haas in that last slide showed our enrollment projections division wide we produce those annually and we produce a 10-year enrollment projection it's based on historical grade level progression methodology which is the same methodology that the weldon cooper center uses and many other school divisions it uses historical data we know on average how many students at a

[00:59:39] school at a specific grade level progress to the next grade level and then using those progression rates out we're able to predict in the next 10 years and then we select different historical models based on the level of growth in those areas in full transparency enrollment has become difficult to predict since the pandemic we know that growth in almero county is also offset by declining birth rates that means we have low incoming kindergarten classes and that is mimicking state trends as well we've increasing alternative schooling and high housing costs so what we were predicting in the short term is that elementary school projections remain relatively stable but will grow over the

[01:00:19] long term so that's one side of the equation which is our enrollment we compare that against our building capacity our building capacity calculation is based on current programs and staffing levels it is not how many kids we can put in the building because the fire marshal said so it's how many that we can put in the building and effectively deliver instruction and our programs such as sped programs preschool programs or differentiated staffing model etc so combining those two figures our enrollment projections by school and our building capacity by school we're able to predict and project our

[01:00:57] capacity conflicts so what this chart shows is the projected capacity conflicts for the schools in the study for the next five years. I'll just walk you across Agner Hurt to orient you. So Agner Hurt has a K-5 building capacity of 432 students.

[01:01:14] When we compare that against their enrollment projection, we estimate that they will have 30 seats next year. So a positive number means there's available seats. A red is over capacity. Typically, when we talk about K-5 building capacity, we do not factor in trailers because trailers are a temporary solution.

[01:01:34] but due to the nature of the study and the the immediate timeline of that new school we did factor in trailers as a short-term solution so you'll see different numbers for Hollymead and Baker Butler so we factor their trailers in and then Agner and Woodbrook we typically use current programs but there's and we'll get into there's a difference of their pre-k programs so we use numbers that assume that the pre-k classrooms were moving back to Woodbrook That decreases Woodbrook's capacity for K-5 students.

[01:02:08] So this data is for the next five years in the short term. The next table is years five through ten. So these are the more long-term capacities. The numbers in yellow changed for a couple reasons.

[01:02:24] One, we're not factoring in trailers when we talk about long-term. So these are the numbers used when we were talking about the new school. And two, they placed preschool programs in the right place. And what I mean by that is our preschool programs right now are where there are space.

[01:02:43] Broadus Wood hosts multiple preschool programs that have Baker-Butler students and Greer students. Hollymead's two pre-K classrooms, a majority of other districts. So this assumes and puts the preschool programs in the right place so we know where to have the capacity in the future.

[01:03:02] Another set of data points that the committee weighed was the developments in the pipeline. we had a representative from the office of community development come and share school district by school district where there are projects that are under review where there are projects approved and the potential yield for those projects so this is just a snapshot of it but if you want more information by district and by exact developments we have it um it's also on the redistricting website there were three in particular that we needed to keep an eye on because they are the larger one and they are

[01:03:38] already started so that is the north point development which is on 29 north on the east side of 29 north of profit hollywood town center which is in the vicinity of target and then the brook hill development which is 29 north and polar grounds road so i just have some additional data on the three schools that were the objectives so first baker butler as i mentioned it's the second largest elementary school in the county's current enrollment is over 700 students that is 200 more than their building capacity when you don't factor in their

[01:04:15] trailers the blue line is their enrollment it was pretty steady back in the early 2014 and has slowly grown and projected to continue to grow based on the rate of development in that area the yellow line is their capacity if you factor in their trailers and the red line is building only overcapacity is a number that we did our best to quantify the impact of that number so the most noticeable is that all six fifth-grade classes are located in a trailer. Their pre-k programs are impacted. As I mentioned, pre-k programs are where their

[01:04:52] kids wear their space. So they are currently enrolled at Broadus Wood, Hollymead, and Agner Hurt. The single pre-k class that is at Baker Butler is limited based on the size of the room available. All our building capacity figures are about classrooms, but they're having space constraints in what we call their core spaces. So cafeteria to accommodate all lunches. They have lunch begins at 10:25 and ends at 1:35. Kindergarten classes eat in their classroom. They're having challenges around parking and drop-off as well. To ensure there's enough classroom spaces, all the smaller support

[01:05:30] spaces are crunched and shared. So these are just some examples around our EL teachers, three to a space, there's no conference or meeting room, not enough staff bathrooms the reading interventions the speech pathologists share space etc so we just hope to paint the picture we've gotten a lot of feedback that the recommendation doesn't move enough kids and i think this is this is why um and we can talk about uh why why more were not considered but just to keep this in the picture this this is the why um why we want to provide relief so on the opposite end of the spectrum sony point is our one of our smaller elementary

[01:06:10] schools and they've had to have an opposite uh enrollment challenge so this gives you a wider look this goes back from 2005 it's time it was growing at a peak around 2010 and then since then has um as a rural school has declined pre-pandemic they were 232 they took a dip like most of our schools and have been stable um since which we project to continue their current enrollment is 181 students being a small school has its challenges we just tried to highlight a couple

[01:06:44] of them first and foremost is their grade level cohort when they're so small the number per grade matter and either they have too much for two classes or too little and based on our staffing formulas this has resulted into either a large single class in a grade level or the forcing of combo classes whether that's a four or five class or a two three class they've had challenges with their part-time staff allocations and the ability to attract and retain position quality staff and their specialists so their current math art and music allocation are 0.4 fte and they often have

[01:07:24] to combine multiple roles to make someone full-time so here are just some examples of what that looks like uh when the grade level cohorts uh present some challenges so and the dark orange on the left is what happened last school year with 10 teachers um spread across the sixth grades they had to do some combo classes in their upper grades in the current school year they have a challenge in their fourth grade class it's a class of 25 at the beginning of the school year i've since heard from that teacher it's now 26 and the last the last section is just a hypothetical this is what

[01:08:01] it would look like if there were two per class at an average of 19. so the last school and the objectives is the is woodbrook again the blue line is enrollment and then the red is the capacity of the pre-k is at woodbrook woodbrook was a small school hovering around 300 350. an addition was added to that school and students were redistricted that's the large jump in that 2018 time frame and they have since grown they had a peak enrollment at 560 last school year and at 523

[01:08:39] this school year so some of their capacity challenges is that they were experiencing overcrowding issues last year so in response three preschool programs two bright stars classrooms and a special education pre-k were moved to agner hurt this school year we still are able to provide transportation but it's operating in a shuttle manner so students ride their neighborhood bus to woodbrook then they are switched to another bus which takes them to agner hurt this has proved we prove both logistically challenging but also reduces instructional time for preschool students so while they're operating well this year we want

[01:09:18] to bring those preschool programs back and to do that enrollment has to be reduced just a little history about i mentioned a previous redistricting study it was studied in the fall of 2017 and implemented in 2018-19 school year when that edition opened so that's a recap of that of those moves and it included moving students from Greer to Agner students from Greer to Woodbrook and students from Agner Hurt to Woodbrook including some areas that we're going to talk about tonight I think it's important that it feels recent it is recent but it does not affect the same

[01:09:57] kids the kids in this cohort have progressed to middle school so what's changed since 2017. Two sides of the equation, the capacity and the enrollment. We have modified our capacity estimate for that building now that we've, the addition has opened for several years and we have more experience with those multi-classroom spaces and how many we can effectively put in those spaces. But they've also had an increase in support services, EL teachers, reading interventions, which all require additional space and reduces the capacity of that building. Second, harder to predict was pretty significant shifts in enrollment patterns we've had several

[01:10:35] apartment complexes during that study which had very stable enrollment have since experienced growth and have larger number of students that's due to different housing patterns of the city economic factors and others but an enrollment projection model would not have picked that up so with all that background data and more I just highlight the big stuff we gave them a big binder of data we worked with them to develop scenarios I will not spend all night discussing every scenario that they created but I just do want to emphasize that they were thoughtful modified eliminated scenarios they

[01:11:14] started in the long term got stuck moved to the short term moved back to the long term and ultimately were able to narrow it down to several scenarios which they shared with the community for feedback so they shared three scenarios related to stony point and that's a map here and included stony point a which moved kids from stone robinson stony point b which moved kids from baker butler and then a combination of those two scenarios

[01:11:47] they narrowed it down to several what we call baker butler and hollymead scenarios all four were all variations of neighborhoods that were south of airport road and west of 29 north so in the target hollymead shopping center area those four options the primary differentiation between was the number of students so option one moved 73 students all the way to option four which

[01:12:20] moved 101 students and were a variation of different neighborhoods in that area and lastly they had two scenarios which moved students from woodbrook to agner hurt one was woodbrook a as i mentioned those neighborhoods of minor ridge and branchlands and b was actually a double moved it would move students from woodbrook to agner agner didn't have enough room to take all of those kids so then it moved a neighborhood from agner to woodbrook with those scenarios finalized there

[01:12:56] were four community meetings that were held one at woodbrook one at baker butler there was a virtual meeting and one at Stone Robinson each had a small group protocol which gained feedback so those links or feedback from those meetings as I mentioned we also issued a community survey there's a summary report of that survey and then all the open-ended comments from that survey organized by scenario we also maintained an email address receiving 35 emails for feedback so with that background here is the recommendation as Dr. Haas said this was the committee's

[01:13:34] recommendation and we made no modifications i think it's important to mention as a committee of 19 i think only one of these is was fully unanimous we did take votes and so these are the these were the majority so stony point a is the recommendation which moves 42 students in the area of riverview and cascadia from stone robinson to stony point students in this area are currently district to attend burley middle school and so no change is uh to middle school boundaries is recommended so the first map just identifies the area impacted so as the light orange is stone

[01:14:12] robinson the dark orange is stony point and the area on the left center of your screen is the impacted area if we zoom in this is a neighborhood near darden tau park the hatched area is the area that we are discussing and then lastly zooming back out this would be this is what the map would look like if the new boundaries were accepted so just a couple data points on what the impact of

[01:14:51] this would be if accepted so same format as the previous charts this just shows the actor of stony point and stone robinson so stony point with the capacity of 228 and a current enrollment of 181 this proposal would had 42 students and so when you take those 42 students and you add them to to your enrollment projections for Stony Point.

[01:15:15] These are our updated enrollment projections with those neighborhoods compared against the capacity number. You'll see there is an asterisk on the capacity number for Stony Point. We had a lot of discussion about the capacity for Stony Point and there's further detail in the community presentation if you're interested.

[01:15:39] The committee also looked at demographic inputs. They looked at race, which is in the meeting materials. We're highlighting here three student population groups, which are English learners, SPED, and something we call GAP Group One, which is a state designation that includes students with disabilities, English language learners, and economically disadvantaged students.

[01:16:00] So you can see the current percentages by Stony Point and Stone Robinson and what they would look like after if these neighborhoods were to be moved.

[01:16:17] And the last set of data for this particular scenario has to do with split middle school feeder patterns. Stony Point is a district that attends two different middle schools. Currently 69% of their population attends Burley and 31% attends Lakeside.

[01:16:36] That would be impacted by this scenario as Cascadian River U, sorry for the typo, also attend Burley. So their new percentage would be 75-25. And here's the distance comparison, the distance of this neighborhood from Stony Point and from Stoner Robinson.

[01:16:59] recommendation for baker butler and hollymead is scenario three which moves 88 students from baker butler to hollymead in the areas of timberwood boulevard abington and monakin lane students in this area currently attend lakeside middle school and no change to middle school boundaries is recommended both baker butler and hollymead are both districted to lakeside so the impacted area is on the right this is the area of 29 north 29 north is the thick pink line

[01:17:34] this is target targets right there. This is a new apartment complex here. Just zoomed in on the

[01:17:49] impacted area. And the last visual is if accepted what the new boundaries would look like. So here's the capacity impact. If this recommendation was accepted, Baker Butler would lose 88 students. So

[01:18:25] here's the revised projection. As you can see, they're still in the red. And as a reminder that capacity does already includes their trailers uh and hollymead next year is projected to have 17 students but that available capacity is projected to dwindle this committee wrestled very heavily with how much to provide relief to baker butler versus the capacity of hollymead and so i think this illustrates their attempt to balance it to the best of their ability this is the demographic

[01:19:02] impact if accepted again the first line is the current percentage of english learners sped in gap group one at each school and then the bottom line is how the school would change if that neighborhood was moved and then the last scenario for next school year is is the woodbrook to agner and it's recommended for scenario a which moves 59 students in the areas of minor ridge branchland

[01:19:37] pine and pine haven from woodbrook to agner students in these areas currently attend journey and no changes to the middle school boundaries is recommended to orient you here's 29 north this is fashion square mall here and it's the area in the hatched this last image is if the new boundaries are accepted what the boundaries would look like a lot of conversation around contiguous boundaries i think it's important to note that they weren't contiguous just agner was

[01:20:15] was not contiguous to start with. Here's the capacity data. If this recommendation were to be accepted, again, the net difference is 59 students.

[01:20:31] And so you can see the available capacity at Agner Hurt and the available capacity at Woodbrook.

[01:20:49] Additional data point on the demographics of these two schools. Again, the current demographics of Woodbrook and Agner on the first line and then what the after would be if these students were moved.

[01:21:14] Last piece of data point. Agner Hurt is another district that is currently split in their middle school boundaries Woodbrook is not a hundred percent of Woodbrook attends Journey currently Agner Hurt eighty percent attend Burley and twenty percent attend Journey in this scenario the proposal is to keep those students at Journey which impacts the split at Agner Hurt from 80/20 to 70/30 so moving towards the

[01:21:48] long term almost there is the new school again that's scheduled open in the 29 30 school year as a reminder of the timing this board did request both schools to be constructed at the same time but funding limitations prevent required you to prioritize and the time we prioritized the mountain view district and the northern feeder pattern the study was born on that conversation again we're in the middle of the study and it's scheduled to open for the 29 30 school year there were two sites that were considered we have been proffered by two developers

[01:22:28] one in the north point development that's a fully graded pad site 10 acres small for elementary school large for a proffer it's in a good location actually we're actually in the process of negotiating a revision to that it's pad ready very favorable proffer the brook hill proffer smaller that's within the brook hill development again that's polo grounds road and 29 north that is not as flat and it is smaller of acres we've had a couple questions on this the high

[01:23:08] school site is different than this proper there were two proffers related to the brook hill development this was specifically for an elementary school the committee developed preliminary boundaries for both of these sites but ultimately recommended the North Point site and here is what a preliminary boundary could look like for that which would be the in the red and it would include 29 north primarily all the neighborhoods north of profit it would include some changes at Holly me there's a neighborhood Spring Ridge and Turnberry and then the areas

[01:23:43] in purple um we tried to place them and then we said it doesn't really matter at this stage those areas in purple could attend north point they could stay at baker that some of them could go to broadest wood um i don't think you need to decide that now and here's what the capacity and demographic impact of those new boundaries would be one of the one of the reasons north point was favored over the brook hill site was the ability to utilize it with more current kids which is at 280 to 350 number there were some other rationales but that was one of the more

[01:24:20] compelling ones was it was around you didn't have to hedge on the too much new development there were current kids that could attend that school so that concluded the recommendations on scenarios we have one more recommendation of something we call legacy boundary clause we are recommending that all rising fifth graders who are our current fourth graders may elect to remain at their current school next year their siblings may also lecture remain at their current school for one year

[01:24:52] transportation will not be provided though two additional long-term considerations that we want staff our staff wants you to be aware of is uh hopefully it's self-evident that this new school is definitely needed um these provide some these boundary changes provide some immediate relief but the study affirmed the need for additional sites in this feeder pattern and so that funding and and timing of that new elementary school must remain in the capital program the second is the concept of the centralized pre-k that was in the long-range planning report out in the CNA and I'm connecting it to this study because if

[01:25:32] you look at the projections of the urban ring schools additional capacity is needed in that area of the district and a centralized pre-k facility if it was constructed to serve the Agner Hurt Greer and Woodbrook communities would provide capacity relief to those schools so acknowledge it's a larger community conversation around if that's the pre-k model we want to pursue I'm just putting it in the lens of a capacity solution for those schools next steps again this recommendation is for information only tonight this will be before you on March 14th there will be a public hearing and then a vote on the recommendation and then if approved new boundaries will go into effect for the

[01:26:10] 24-25 school year open up for questions and comments I know you I know you don't this now but i would be very interested in knowing how many pre-k students we have in the urban room um first of all thank you i know a lot of work went into this um i do have several questions so

[01:26:44] bear with me um first my first is a um basic question when we vote on the 14th are we voting for all of these as a whole do we vote for them each recommendation individually um so i will defer to the chair on that i would say they are they are able to operate independently of each other um so i think individual votes would would uh could happen okay thank you for that um i do have a few questions um the first is related to the stony point um which i think was the first

[01:27:27] scenario that you gave us um the main goal in all of this was if i if we went back was um overcrowding at baker butler so i'm a little confused as to why we are pulling from stone robinson which is not overcrowded it will give them even more seats um to pull into a school that in all honesty i have a lot of concerns about sending additional students to when it is at the very bottom of our list as far as infrastructure and top on our list as far as needing improvements

[01:28:01] and we are talking about adding 42 more students to a school that is already physically crumbling. So I don't know if that's something that you can provide insight to me today or if it's something that you can get to me but it is deeply concerning to me that one we're pulling from a school and not take when another scenario is taking from the overcrowded school and we are not doing the infrastructure necessary to the school before adding

[01:28:32] more students this is a map of Baker Butler's current boundary and a map of where Baker Butler students live this objective this study had multiple objectives right increase baker butler i mean decrease baker brother increase stony point so ideally yes they would to find a solution that would decrease baker butler and increase stony point was studied and evaluated there's two different three different versions of it one

[01:29:11] in fact included this area down here which was the stony point b scenario this area up here was discussed as well this is Burnley station in Gilbert station it was ultimately eliminated from discussion due to flooding concerns and then we re-brought it back again and there was conversations around transportation efficiencies and the challenges of what that would do to our bus routes increasing our bus routes by at least one or by one and then there was conversations

[01:29:45] around if stony point needs enrollment they need growth and so putting more rural areas into stony point is not a long-term solution um okay i would and you and i can talk about this later when we meet but that is something i would like a little more information on um i would like to um go on the record i guess in saying tonight um that i'm disappointed that we don't have public comment tonight um if this is on the agenda um and that's not directed at you i just want that on the record because i and along with my fellow board members have gotten a lot of feedback

[01:30:25] and i know you have as well um in email and phone calls in personal meetings um and so you know for us to make such a very large decision um it's it's heavy for us and there's a lot to consider and so to have a public hearing the same night that we are going to be voting on such a big thing and not having public comment tonight feels wrong to me my other question has to do with Hollymead and some of the feedback I'm getting from there is that I think some of the things that I'm hearing is that

[01:31:02] there was not a community meeting specifically for Hollymead a lot of the parents didn't realize that all of these students were going to be added to their school do you have any insight as to that as well we advertised all community meetings to the to all the schools that were in this study we ultimately selected locations of schools where kids were being moved from which is how the solutions but we at most meetings we had multiple schools attend okay and in your opinion do you feel like you had good representation from the hollymead community

[01:31:42] in feedback and things like that i would say um across the board with the exception of stone robinson and a particular baker bettler neighborhood we did not hear a lot on this study i'll just be fully transparent um i will say that's why we have representatives on the committee though and we had a very vocal and active participants from hollymead district on the committee okay um and then my last question i think does go back to um transportation um was it considered

[01:32:17] or was anybody asked with these changes if that would change whether or not their kids would be riding the bus or not um because i know that um in some of these scenarios for instance the stony point you know you're talking about an extra three miles but in the opposite direction of the highway or whatever so you know some of the feedback i've been hearing is that more students will be riding the bus and will not be driven to school so when we're talking about a scenario that was taken out because we may be adding another bus route but that may have potentially solved this problem

[01:32:51] in a different way um not with the bus situation was that taken into consideration as well that was not a point of discussion that i recommend that i recall and we did not specifically ask OK, that's all I have for right now.

[01:33:06] Thank you. First, I really want to thank everyone on the committee. As someone who does a lot of work that's glamour-free and difficult, I really thank you for all that work.

[01:33:25] And I know that you and I have talked a lot about all of the conversation that went into it. So thank you very much. I also-- I had some questions about that Watts Passage, Burnley Station consideration as well.

[01:33:45] I think something that might be unclear to people is that when you talk about flooding, we're not talking about one day of closing schools because of flooding. We're talking about several days in a row. So that's just one point that I wanted to make, not a question.

[01:34:03] So I want to talk a little bit more about the new developments. And I know that those numbers are not really included in the Hollymead, Baker Butler scenario. So what would we be able to do to-- do you see dealing with those developments a new school yeah i think it's important to know when we we have enrollment projections that's based on historical modeling right and so when we see

[01:34:37] high development areas we strive to choose the historical model that sorry that is the steepest right but there are limitations to that right um often we get feedback that you say well brookhill has i forget the number a thousand kids so add a thousand kids to hollywood's projection there it's very difficult to prove when those kids come how quickly that development will be built out will it be built out at all and are they new kids right new development doesn't mean new kids it could mean kids from within the district um i share all that to say you can't ignore it

[01:35:15] right you just have to keep that in mind and so that's every multiple meetings we kept don't forget about these big and these big developments and where they're going um i acknowledge that you can see when those numbers go red in both hollymead and baker butler that they will have capacity challenges again so that's why the new school we're looking for a short-term solution that eases the capacity challenges at baker butler right now another piece of feedback that i got was whether or not the move to stony point would meet our staffing goals there and could you just speak

[01:35:51] done that a little bit yeah we did um some staffing allocation modeling and holding everything else equal uh it should solve that issue of um having enough two per grade level one thing that you and i talked about also is um if because of the developments or whatever reason because this is hard to predict um hollymead's enrollment does grow more than we expect it to what are some ways

[01:36:28] that you can is there a way to alleviate that yep so there are as I said these are little in the weeds but there's a lot of operational things going on right now as we manage different capacities so I mentioned there's two preschool programs at Hollymead right now that serve majority of this schools outside that district so if capacity becomes an issue at Hollymead those preschool programs could move where there's more space that's option one this year we have coordinated with the irc to place families in the hollymead district because their space

[01:37:03] that has resulted in growth in that area and if people have shared well they've grown since the beginning of the school year it's those families that's a short-term solution for irc and so we can operationally change that as well and then third always temporary capacity and again it would be temporary because the new school would come on those are all my questions thank you very much Roslyn. One of my biggest concerns is the this uh Stone Robins into Stony Point move with the state of Stony Point like I keep I keep going back to that like if that ever we're all looking

[01:37:42] at this like red yellow green um Stony Point reservations again like we don't know what that would look like but it when it says fiscal year 25 would those be there for 25 if that money was available or would those renovations then happen and then not come online to the 25 26 school do we have a feel because that that's a piece that really is really concerning moving a group of kids to a school that has some infrastructure issues and knowing that it could be up to three years

[01:38:18] that's what i'm trying to play yeah so typically in a capital lifespan with that scale of renovation you would design for a year and construct over one to two years maximizing summers and so and i would say the current budget under consideration by the board of supervisors does not include funding for that project as well which shifts that i do acknowledge the need for renovations but if you have not visited stony point i respectfully disagree that it's crumbling i think broadest wood and stony point are older schools but also have the most character

[01:38:54] and are very well maintained uh we're going to replace some casework this summer and with maintenance making small improvements so i encourage you to visit some point uh while is in need of some long-term renovations is the score is relative to our other schools and as you looked at kind of this may be too much in the weeds but as they look could you looked at the movement kind of patterns um you were looking at different pieces of equity one including special ed numbers were they looking knowing that kids in special ed don't all go into just a general

[01:39:32] special ed classroom but we have a base b base c base was any was any of that looked at or is that to know if those schools would have the ability for those kids to come um not at the committee level happy to talk about that with the sped staff where sped factored into the conversations was around the percentage and the demographic impact it's also factored in on the capacity side of the equation schools that have those programs factor that into their capacity and then the last question also might be weedy but just particularly because what you said about irc

[01:40:07] is we think about the kind of the baker buckler to hollymead move and the woodbrook to agner move was any um does anyone look at uh public bus routes knowing that some of the families in those neighbors some of the neighborhoods are affected are relying on public transportation and just knowing that so many of our schools don't have access this might be a larger board of supervisors conversation yeah can you elaborate on what the concern would be well with parents being able to come to parent-teacher conferences to literacy nights pick up their kids if they were

[01:40:42] sick um you know do we know you know that i know longer term conversation we've had you know with board of supervisors how do we get better access to parents without cars with any anything looked that that would be actually help neutral or hurt it was not discussed okay I have questions about the Cascadia move to Stony Point we've received a lot of emails saying that the parents may not have had a chance to give very much

[01:41:15] input were they or could you address that first for my first question so we they were able and we and we did receive impact on the survey the community meeting there was a representative on the community that lived in that neighborhood and we have received various emails from that community and you might have already answered this question but when you look at like the northern part of Baker Butler each of those red dots as to the east of 29

[01:41:49] represent houses right they represent students yeah okay all right so well that's what I meant but were any of those was it ever considered by the the committee to move those students to Stoney Point instead of moving kids from Cascadia to Stoney Point because that would take care of the problem at Vicar Butler plus what's going on it's Stoney Point. Yep that's the area that we were discussing Burnley Station Gilbert Station that I was talking about earlier. So what was the downfall? I think you told me Spillman but what was the

[01:42:25] downfall? So there were considerations due to some flooding concerns there's several low-lying bridges in that area a lot of discussion on how often that happens we don't have good data but as one committee member said any concern of flooding data is enough right and the second was around the rural nature of that if the point is to provide Stony Point with some stable enrollment ideally you would have put a newer development not rural and lastly a transportation efficiency to two buses currently serve that area and they're combined with other

[01:43:03] baker butler neighborhoods if those neighborhoods were districted to stony pointe it would still require two buses so you have a net increase of one additional bus route this question goes to you order chair lee i think one of the questions is in my mind it's difficult to hear public comment and then make a decision a vote that night is there any possibility of doing the public hearing public comment and delaying the vote um I operationally I

[01:43:41] think that would put a real hardship on the families that are going to move so I would be I would not before that but we will also have public comment on March 7th which is what I've shared with people I've written to so people are certainly welcome to give public comment then as we've all noted we've gotten a lot of email so I don't think that there is a lack of public input truly so people have are having opportunities to reach out to us and talk with us and we'll have opportunity on March 7th as well I ask a question

[01:44:17] about that then is it possible to change the public hearing to March 7th we have a public hearing on the budget on March 7th and we've also I know that Roslyn has shared out with the community that March 14th is going to be the public

[01:44:34] comment night, the public hearing night. But there are actually two chances for people to talk to us about this, the 7th and the 14th. Yes. If not the 29th, also I don't know if there's public comment on the 29th, but also possibly then. We don't have public comment on the 29th necessarily. Okay. The 7th and 14th. Can you pull up a picture of the Stone Robinson thing again, the detail that, not to question the cartographers, but, and I don't know how long you've been here, but how is that

[01:45:12] little portion, how was that carved out to go to Stone Robinson anyway? And maybe that's irrelevant, but it's just an odd. This area actually previously was just districted to attend Stoney Point. There was a previous redistricting study in the 2000, approximately 12

[01:45:34] time frame. Back in the 2012 time frame, approximately, Stony Point was actually over 300 kids and we're utilizing all four trailers so there was a redistricting study to study to move kids from Stony Point to Stone Robinson ultimately a solution was not identified there was various

[01:46:12] challenges in that and so soon after that decision Cascadia came online from the site plan review process and so there was an administrative decision to change that area to Stone Robinson before kids were were in it wasn't a full redistricting study because it didn't impact any kids unfortunately they didn't have the crystal ball that starting point wasn't continuing to increase and so result of that some point I want to hear how Woodbrook got cut up in that's

[01:46:48] very weird could you go back to the map that you were on for quite a while that had the red dots on it so it's my understanding that but I'm not quite sure how far over it goes that there's 57 students in that region is that about right yes and does that but does that go

[01:47:20] all the way over to 29 do you have to go all the way over to 29 to grab all 57 yes um I'll just add and this will be very quickly that I quick I have many of the same concerns that everybody else has talked about and they already talked about it so i won't but that i thought that was an important question because um right now those kids go down 29 but they're going over to 29 if they're all the

[01:47:52] way back they're going over to 29 they go down 29 to get to baker butler down profit and um it looks easier on the map to go to stony point but i understand that the roads are rough and i'll probably go check it out before the next meeting yeah especially okay one other question you mentioned um flooding in that area which roads especially would that be a problem or do

[01:48:29] you know i would like i have a visual that i can provide um let me do that so i don't miss miss miss state the roads yeah it's pretty creek yeah it's um during that last flash flooding it's where the two people were rescued uh in the car um and there's there's multiple um roads that cross it can i ask then what they do when they go to so they don't have to cross that road to go to

[01:49:04] baker butler are there alternate routes to get to stony point if there was flooding so they um currently no bus routes cross that area those all go to baker butler so they go up to 29 north but our lakeside routes and our albemoro high school routes all bifurcate on that railroad track as well part of that is a little historical though because the bridges that went over the railroad tracks were not rated for buses but now they are but now they are right so now it's not as big of an issue

[01:49:37] it would not be an issue for the buses to go over them for the weight for the weight um and on the flooding um when those flood are do those tend to be the days that we close school for flooding anyway yes and again they're more multi-day uh events and again i don't want to paint pictures like it doesn't happen all the time but right when it happens it's significant right i i guess that's what i'm getting to this isn't something that's happening multiple times a year or you

[01:50:12] know it's a thank you the only question i still have left i'm so sorry is if you're in the stony point district as it is right now are there flooding concerns along those same roads are the bridges on that side but it's right on the board i mean again i'll bring the map it's right on the border so they don't it's it's where the i think this follows the real let me get a map so I'll check I mean we'll do some homework on that yeah because I was thinking that Watts Passage Road is really in Stoney Point's district instead of being in Baker Butler

[01:50:50] but I might be wrong but I was thinking that take more kids out of Baker Butler alleviate the overcrowding more all right thanks very much Rosaline thank you thank you thank you all right all we have left is announcements and school board superintendent business do we have any announcements or school board superintendent business

[01:51:24] all right hearing none this meeting is adjourned

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Coraggio Consulting · aguyonx.com